...How to Tell a True War Story from The Things They Carried In a true war story, if there's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper meaning. And in the end, really, there's nothing much to say about a true war story, except maybe "Oh." True war stories do not generalize. They do not indulge in abstraction or analysis. For example: War is hell. As a moral declaration the old truism seems perfectly true, and yet because it abstracts, because it generalizes, I can't believe it with my stomach. Nothing turns inside. It comes down to gut instinct. A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe. This one does it for me. I've told it before - many times, many versions - but here's what actually happened. We crossed that river and marched west into the mountains. On the third day, my friend Curt Lemon stepped on a boobytrapped artillery round. He was playing catch with Rat Kiley, laughing, and then he was dead. The trees were thick; it took nearly an hour to cut an LZ for the dustoff. Later, higher in the mountains, we came across a baby VC water buffalo. What it was doing there I don't know - no farms, no paddies - but we chased it down and, got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted village where we set up for the night. After supper Rat Kiley went over and stroked its nose. He opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo...
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...Brianne ENGL 1126 Summary of How to Tell a True War Story How to Tell a True War Story is written by Tim O’Brien. It is set in Vietnam between the years of nineteen fifty-four and nineteen seventy-five. In this section, the story starts out by talking about a man named Rat Kiley. Kiley is writing a letter to a friend’s sister telling her how good of a man he really was. He also writes about different stories that happened and how he was the first to volunteer for things, just to emphasize the greatness of this man. The sister of the deceased man does not write back to Rat Kiley which greatly upsets him. The story goes on to identify the man as Curt Lemon. Eventually, it is clear how Lemon died. Kiley and Lemon were tossing a grenade back and forth to each other when suddenly Lemon ended up stepping into a booby trap. Another man in the military by the name of Mitchell Sanders tells O’brien a story to teach him lesson. The story is about two men who set out to the mountains on a mission. After a few days of living up there, the men hear strange noises. It gets worse and worse so they order that the land below them be attacked. They pack up their stuff and walk down the mountain. When they reach the bottom their commander asks them what they heard and the men reply with nothing. Sanders claims the moral of the story is that no one listens, you need to listen to the quiet. He goes on to say that the moral of a war story cannot be extracted without a deeper meaning surfacing...
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...In “How to Tell a True War Story”, the message that the story creates is that it really isn’t about war. What O’Brien is trying to say it that it never really is in most of the stories that pertain to war, if you think about it. For instance, on page 496, in this story he claims “it wasn’t a war story. It was a love story. It was a ghost story”. He creates this message simply by describing in detail the emotional impact losing your friends can have on a person. When you read or listen to this story, you have to have actually be able to understand the story otherwise you will just be another “dumb cooze”, you know? Then again, it is a pretty complex story. Asking if the author’s message is effective is a tricky question because it is both a...
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...Analyses How to Tell a True War Story In “How to Tell a True War Story,” Tim O’Brien varies from a straight forward approach because of the horrifying contents of war. Instead, his approach is one of repetition, where he retells the death of Curt Lemon, but with different versions. He adopts this structure to make it more tolerable to his audience, express that true war stories never seem to have an end, and demonstrate how truths become contradictory. True war stories by nature are so gruesome and devastating, that the author has to compromise its accuracy by inserting nonfactual, yet more palatable details to cause his listener to believe. The author supports this point when he says, “All you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get to the real truth” (296). In another section he says, “Often the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness” (289). Interestingly, O’Brien reinforces this idea again with the example of the story that Mitchell Sanders tells. Sander says to him, “I got a confession to make… last night, man, I had to make up a few things… yeah, but listen, it’s still true…those six guys, they heard wicked sound out there…they heard sound you just plain won’t believe.” In those examples, we clearly observed how the author uses his peculiar structure to reveal the necessity to season war stories to transform...
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...As a writer, Tim O'Brien is responsible for telling his story accurately and well. Not because it is true, but because it is his commitment as a writer, and because he is the only one who can tell his story. In How to Tell a True War Story, O'Brien discusses many horrific events that took place during his time fighting in Vietnam. As he tries to recall stories from the war, he very heavily relies on imagery to convince the reader, as well as himself, that the story he is telling is completely true. Many events in this story are described using images and sounds, for it is essential in telling the story as a whole. As O'Brien recalls the events of the war, he relies on imagery to depict not only the scenery but actual events as well. An important...
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...Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” starts with the brief tongue-in-cheek statement, “this is true.” While most authors seek to build credibility with their reader, O’Brien actively undermines his own trustworthiness in order to convey the skepticism with which he believes audiences should treat all ‘true’ war stories. His most effective strategy for doing so is the interweaving of a potentially fictitious narrative within a formal essay, further developing “How to Tell a True War Story’s” message of disillusionment with the attributes characteristically attributed to war and the dubious nature of war stories by creating a sense of suspicion and general distrust between the reader and the speaker. As O’Brien interweaves narrative within his essay, such stories are...
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...to someone who hasn’t experienced it in the way you have. Events affect people differently and without stories it would not be possible to even try and comprehend the pain of others. How a story is told changes the emotional response of the audience and with that their understanding of the events. Tim O’Brien explores the necessity of ambiguity between fact and fiction in order to create a visceral response to war in his short story “How To Tell A True War Story” which is a chapter in the novel The Things They Carried. O’Brien is able to examine this more thoroughly through the use of irony in title, the narrator’s internal conflict with truth and fiction, juxtaposition of writing styles and the nature motif. Margaret Atwood also investigates how real stories are portrayed in her poem “It Is Dangerous To Read Newspapers” by utilizing juxtaposition. Internal conflict is the basis of this entire story; O’Brien is struggling with how to tell his story and whether the things he experienced really are true to others. The style of this piece is similar to that of a debate with the evidence, or war story, being presented and then explained as to why it is correct. The critical essay “Metafiction in The Things They Carried” also references this writing style: “By defining a war story so broadly, O'Brien writes more stories, interspersing the definitions with examples from the war to illustrate them” (Calloway 4). Calloway says that this effective in emphasizing the lack of definitive...
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...Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” centers on the principle that a reader cannot always trust the narrator of a story to tell the truth. The reader can listen, but must never cease to analyze in order to decipher the truth in each story. In Tim O’Brien’s short story, his narrator is naturally accepted and assumed to be the author of the story. Through this narrator, a story of personal Vietnam War experiences unfolds. Because this appears to be true stories told by O’Brien, the reader is left to assume all the tales are true encounters when in fact, O’Brien mixes truth and fiction in order to make the story believable. It is important to remember that the soldier telling the war story can only relay the facts that he remembers from the event. He may be sincere in telling the events as he remembers, but not accurate in reporting the entirety of the historical picture.. The setting is the Vietnam War; a war filled with controversy, and soldiers and civilians struggling to make sense of it all. In the story, O’Brien creates a believable setting with believable characters. He describes a setting that one would expect to find in Vietnam: rugged terrain, foxholes, jungles and muddy rivers. He also uses the giant canopy of a tree (as one would expect in this area) to tell the details of the death of his friends, Lemon and Rat. Describing the smell of the moss, the white blossoms and the lack of sunlight allowed by the tree, O’Brien creates a soothing feeling...
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...War Stories Earnest Hemingway and Tim O'Brien both draw from personal experiences in war to write “A Soldiers Home” and “How to Tell a True War Story”. The character Krebs in “Soldiers Home” and the narrator in “How to Tell a True War Story” both display the psychological and emotional tolls that war takes on those who have experienced it. Both of these stories give the reader a view of the experience of war from a soldier’s perspective. While Hemingway focuses the emotional apathy of Krebs, O'Brien's perspective is much more graphic and detailed, with strong descriptions of the scenery, the sights and sounds. The methods used by O'Brien and Hemingway vary, but the end results are similar. Both authors draw from personal experience from war to tell their stories and create the characters there in. In “Soldiers Home” Krebs has a hard time rejoining society. He feels out of touch and unappreciated. This is pointed out when Hemingway states “By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over” (Hemingway 187). Krebs was unable to relate to the people in his home town, as most had already heard the war stories and “His town had heard too many atrocity stories to be thrilled by actualities. Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it” (Hemingway 187). The fact was that the truth was either too boring or too strange. The narrator...
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...If something exciting, horrific, or life changing happens in our lives, then what do we do? What we do is that we tell the people that did not see or has not experienced it, and just like that, the soldiers from the book, “The Things They Carried,” tells their own happenings and experiences. So many ways the storytellings are examined, but it all sums up and makes sense. There is a lot we can get from the way Tim O’Brien writes about storytelling and how he portrays it. In the end we can understand why the stories are so important. Just from the way storytelling is portrayed we can understand that it is something hard for anyone to retell the way it is supposed to be, for many different reasons. While reading the different stories being told...
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...and How to the War Story Told I decided to choose the “A Soldiers Home” by Ernest Hemingway and “How to tell a War story” by Tim Obrien. I will explain each story and how the story are very similar in theme. “How to Tell a True War Story” examines the complex relationship between the war experience and storytelling. It is told half from O’Brien’s role as a soldier, as a reprise of several old Vietnam stories, and half from his role as a storyteller, as a discourse on the art of storytelling. In Tim O'Brien's short story, "How to Tell a True War Story", Rat Kiley's friend is killed. He writes to his friend's sister and when no response is given, he becomes frustrated. Due to this frustration he calls her a "dumb cooze." Following this O'Brien argues that this is a true war story because it is not moral, never to believe a war story if it seems moral. Next the story jumps to a forest where men need to be quiet for weeks. After a period of time goes by they are no longer sane. They begin to hear noises that scare them, and when they cannot take the silence and the creepiness of the forest they return to camp. When question about their return, the men do not respond, their story is in their eyes and that is enough for anyone who knows that a true war story "never seems to end," it is continuous even after it is done being told. A true war story is also never moral and does not generalize. The truth is so hard to reach. A person can go looking for the moral of the story, but...
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... Summer reading in class essay 1) O’Brien tells numerous stories from his past with the common factor of war or loss of loved ones. In the beginning of the story, O’Brien explains all the physical objects that the men carried during the war. He then moves on to several war stories, describing his experiences in Vietnam. These chapters present other intangible things that these soldiers also carried- such as Lieutenant Jimmy Cross’s loneliness. In these first few chapters he also depicts the setting in Vietnam. In the fourth chapter, “On the Rainy River,” O’Brien gives readers a glimpse into his life before the war, and tells of his almost escape to Canada after being drafted. O’Brien then moves back into war stories telling of the man he killed to Henry Dobbins carrying pantyhose around his neck. These semi-true stories further illustrate the extra emotional baggage these soldiers carried. In the chapter “Speaking of Courage,” O’Brien tells a fictional story of Norman Bowker trying to communicate his post-war feelings, and in the next tribute explains his tribute to Norman Bowker (who committed suicide.) O’Brien then tells of his post war life and of his trip back to Vietnam with his own daughter. When O’Brien is finished with war anecdotes, he tells one final story of how when he was nine, the love of his life, Linda, passed away. This final story brings the book to end with O’Brien explaining how stories help him survive because they give him an illusion of aliveness...
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...and the political issues at stake there. The Vietnam War was in many ways a wild and terrible work of fiction written by some dangerous and frightening story tellers. First the United States decided what constituted good and evil, right and wrong, civilized and uncivilized, freedom and oppression for Vietnam, according to American standards; then it traveled the long physical distance to Vietnam and attempted to make its own notions about these things clear to the Vietnamese people—ultimately by brute, technological force. For the U.S. military and government, the Vietnam that they had in effect invented became fact. For the soldiers that the government then sent there, however, the facts that their government had created about who was the enemy, what were the issues, and how the war was to be won were quickly overshadowed by a world of uncertainty. Ultimately, trying to stay alive long enough to return home in one piece was the only thing that made any sense to them. As David Halberstam puts it in his novel, One Very Hot Day, the only fact of which an American soldier in Vietnam could be certain was that "yes was no longer yes, no was no longer no, maybe was more certainly maybe." Almost all of the literature on the war, both fictional and nonfictional, makes clear that the only certain thing during the Vietnam War was that nothing was certain. Philip Beidler has pointed out in an impressive study of the literature of that war that "most of the time in Vietnam, there were some...
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...When it comes to Greek Mythology, one of the most famous stories – is the Trojan War, the fight between Troy and the Achaeans. Throughout the years, there have been numerous representations about this grand tale, from a beautiful amphora portraying Achilles and Ajax playing a board game, created around 500 B.C. (Arts) and the epic poem, Homer’s Iliad describes in great details the last few weeks of the war, written in 800 B.C. A more modern take on the war is the famous movie Troy with actors Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom, released in 2004. Here we have three different mediums, an amphora, a long poem and a modern film, yet they all tell the tragic bloody tale of the Trojan War. I will discuss the overall theme that these three pieces share,...
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...they carried is novel consists of the small stories about the memories and imaginations from the Vietnam War. The Narrator Tim O’Brien also the protagonist shares his experience in this novel through small stories and a unique story telling technique. In the beginning of story, O’Brien, the graduate student from Harvard gets drafted to go to the war. Even though he had a chance to flee the country, he was worried that he and his family would lose their social reputation due to his actions so he ends up going to the war. Throughout the novel narrator talks about his company’s soldiers and shares their story with us. The main theme of the book is to show story truth is truer than happening truth. O’Brien wants his readers to know that when we hear a story based on feelings rather than facts, it usually has a great impact on our spiritual life. Journal 1 “I was no soldier. I...
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